It might even span across to other niches. "Baking your own bread" is not that hard, if you get to it. But, becausethe entire process (fertilising ground, selecting seeds, growing grain, milling it) is too much for one person, lot's of people just give up alltogether and conclude that "today it is impossible to make your own food". Especially once you learn that bread mostly comes from large, complex industrial complexes today. Yet "just doing it" is very rewarding, as all the home-bakers will tell you.
And it spans across time as well: Sure, no-one can make a toaster from 0: mine own ore, distill your own plastics etc (there's a brilliant documentary from someone attempting just this, forgot its name). So people conclude that when the toaster stops working, there's nothing one can do, and they turn to Ali-express or Amazon and just buy a new one.
In short: I think labor alienation is toxic, in that it seeds itself into areas that don't need hyper specialisation.
The Linux Core Kernel Commentary [1]
It takes only the parts of the kernel you need to understand, leaving out the drivers, device classes, and much of te ancillary pieces. For the parts it chooses, it goes through them line by line and follows the boot process, explains the concepts of a Unix and SYSV-like kernel.
The 15M lines becomes much less intractible.
[1] https://books.google.com/books/about/Linux_Core_Kernel_Comme...
I suppose you could say many things have failed due to no one seeing the big picture among all the tiny details but without people focusing on the details none of that would have been possible to begin with.
I'm not a historian but I can imagine that a medieval specialist, such as for example blacksmith, could very much fix his own house (or maybe even build a new one), grow food, take care of animals, make wooden tools, make some simple herbal medicine etc. I'm guessing a lot of he was consuming was produced by himself and his family. Today, for engineers it's the total opposite - we only consume things produced by others, and essentially by strangers whom we've never met.
Regarding fragility specifically, if a major crisis comes (say a war), the desk jockeys, esp. ones didn't have the wisdom to accumulate resources, will fare much worse than someone who's say running a homestead. If they did accumulate resources (provided they don't become worthless by hiperinflation etc.), they will be able to buy the essentials and hope their stash lasts until the end of the crisis.
You should read Collapse Of Complex Societies by Professor Joseph Tainter.
Tl;dr a step change in complexity of ancient societies more often than not lead to their downfall. They were unable to train/retrain specialists quickly enough to deal with surprises.
>> The social impact, for one, is in general a large extent of estrangement from our human essence. Tangibility is intuitive, abstraction, not so much.
Specialization does introduce fragility, but that's something you brought to the discussion, not something that was present in the comment. This seems more like the common complaint that working on abstract fuzzy intangible things is damaging to your soul.
Using it as a counter argument against specialization isn’t very insightful though. Not even Marx tried to argue that (to Marx specialization was only alienating when you did it for the benefit of the bourgeoisie). Specialization is one of the most fundamental components of a developed economy. If you look at any ancient agrarian society, they had barely any specialization compared to a modern developed economy, and if you track the economic development of any society, you’ll notice specialization ticks upward along with it.
On the other hand, you make a fair point - tangible contribution to Things is probably built into us from our origin as tool-makers.
But isn't the gradual separation from direct contact with Made Things inevitable? At some point the body of knowledge required to make a meaningful contribution grows so large that learning it approaches the human lifespan. How can we avoid too much hyper-specialization in that case?